“Casually mentioning a female instead of a male name was sufficient to impair men’s cognitive performance,” according to a research team from Radboud University in the Netherlands. “Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness.”

When heterosexual males interact with attractive women, they put so much effort into trying to make a good impression that they don’t have the resources left to think clearly. Caveat: by “males” the scientists mean their usual research animals, university students.

The classic London Underground Map, created by Harry Beck in 1933, is the granddaddy of all those schematic maps that chart subway systems in a simplified manner, without regard to the true scale of distances between stations. These maps reduce complex systems to comprehensible basics, but a recent NYU study shows that users actually regard the maps as if they were drawn to scale, and act accordingly: